Founded in 1948, Hurriyet is the largest Turkish newspaper company with a circulation of around 400.000 in June 2013. In 1996, Hurriyet began publishing an online version and today it is the third largest media publishing company in Europe.

The Challenge: Resolving application availability issues

Hurriyet’s two datacenters are located in Istanbul and in Ankara. Prior to 2007, Hurriyet leveraged DNS Round Robin to load balance web servers for the internet, several media portals and corporate sites. “The internet service at 600 Mb/sec was unreliable as servers were frequently down and we faced a significant threat of losing our customer base. We needed a secure and a reliable load balancing solution that would ensure web server availability to retain and increase the customer base,” says Muhsin Ocal, IT coordinator for Hurriyet.

La solución: A reliable application delivery controller

In 2007, Hurriyet moved from DNS servers to Citrix NetScaler MPX 9000 severs. NetScaler was selected as the load balancing solution based on research and the recommendation of their ISP Dogan Telecom. In 2011, Hurriyet migrated to two MPX 10500s, one in each of their datacenters. One MPX 10500 was allocated for corporate and the other for the internet. Shortly, Hurriyet will migrate from the MPX 10500s to the two recently acquired SDX 17550s to scale on demand for additional users and applications.

Citrix NetScaler is an application delivery controller (ADC) that optimizes the security, availability, scalability and performance of web-based and custom applications. It is available as a physical or virtual appliance.

NetScaler SDX is a true service delivery networking platform for enterprises and cloud datacenters. NetScaler SDX provides an advanced virtualized architecture that supports multiple NetScaler instances on a single hardware appliance, while an advanced control plane unifies provisioning, monitoring and management to meet the most demanding multi-tenant requirements.

Beneficios principales

Ensures 100% website availability

By migrating to NetScaler from the legacy DNS servers, Hurriyet was able to ensure 100% website availability which dramatically improved the customer experience.

Reduces security threats by 50%

Hurriyet has experienced a dramatic reduction in DDoS attacks to the website since migrating to NetScaler MPX. The web log of user activity proved that these security attacks decreased by about 50%.

Increases unique visitors by 10%

Since migrating to NetScaler, Hurriyet was able to measure an increase in the number of unique visitors and page views by about 10%, helping to expand their customer base.

Looking Ahead

“We are extremely happy with NetScaler MPX and the support from our local Citrix partner in Turkey. We look forward to evaluating the NetScaler App Firewall for application security and also leveraging NetScaler SDX to host multiple domains and optimize our current Citrix XenDesktop environment in the future,” Ocal concluded.

We are extremely happy with NetScaler MPX and the support from our local Citrix partner in Turkey. We look forward to evaluating the NetScaler App Firewall for application security and also leveraging NetScaler SDX to host multiple domains and optimize our current Citrix XenDesktop environment in the future.